The Enduring Design Legacy of the Coca-Cola Bottle

02/07/2015

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I still
remember, as a young boy on holiday, being rewarded with an icy Coca-Cola in a
curved glass bottle. For me, the sense memory of that cold Coke in my hand is
indelibly linked to long summer days, warm sunshine and the crazy,
irrepressible joy of our family trips. A chilled bottle of Coca-Cola may evoke
a different remembrance for each of us — perhaps the bright green of a baseball
stadium on a crisp autumn afternoon, or gliding to the beach in the back seat of
your parents’ convertible—but whatever it is, the moment is powerful, evocative
and authentically yours. Everyone has their own Coca-Cola memory.

That doesn’t
happen by chance. When I joined Coca-Cola as head of global design, I paid a
visit to the company’s archives in Atlanta, Georgia, and was immediately struck
by the scope of the brand’s history and its unforgettable visual identity. To
say that Coca-Cola has done it all from a design perspective is an
understatement. But it’s not just about logotypes and packaging; Coca-Cola has
infused, enhanced, even defined American culture almost since its inception in
1886 — everyone from Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Jimi Hendrix to Jesse
Owens, Gladys Night, Clint Eastwood, Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen have been
captured enjoying a Coca-Cola from that iconic, contoured glass bottle. Today,
the brand’s universal appeal has established Coca-Cola as a worldwide symbol
for shared moments of joy and refreshment.

Poring over
this enormous body of work was equal parts overwhelming and inspirational, and
I found myself returning to that famous bottle, with its fluted lines and
cascading, organic shape — what noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy described
as the “perfect liquid wrapper.” As a piece of design it’s simultaneously
intimate and universal, personal and popular. But the timelessness of the
bottle isn’t just born from its perfect interplay of sharp and fluid forms, or
its indelible silhouette. As I discovered in the company archives, the contour
bottle has for 100 years represented one very important concept to Coca-Cola
customers: a promise.

By 1915, 29
years after Coca-Cola was founded, the drink’s distinctive, refreshing
character had found nationwide demand — and a host of imitators. To combat these
competitors, Coca-Cola Bottling Company members agreed to develop, fund and
support a “distinctive package” for their popular product. The creative brief,
sent to eight glass companies across the country, was simple but far from easy:
Develop “a bottle so distinct you would recognise it by feel in the dark or
lying broken on the ground.” In Terre Haute, Indiana, the Root Glass Company
went to work and teased the form of a Cocoa Pod into the delightful shape we
know today.

And with it was
born a promise: “What you are holding in your hand,” the bottle declared, “is
genuine Coca-Cola. This is not a lesser product or a fake. It’s the real
thing.”

The design
became so popular, so familiar and instantly recognisable that just 33 years
later, in 1949, a study showed that less than one percent of Americans could
not identify the Coca-Cola bottle by shape alone. On April 12, 1961, after all
rights to the original silhouette had expired, the U.S. Patent Office declared
the bottle’s “distinctive contour shape” to be so quintessential, so
unmistakable, that the form itself was awarded Trademark status.

But by that
time the contour bottle had already been stamped in the American consciousness
through popular culture and fine art alike. It appeared on the cover of Time
magazine in 1950, and in the works of sculptor Robert Rauchenberg and painters
Salvadore Dali and Sir Edward Paolozzi. By far the most famous portrayal of the
Coke bottle remains Andy Warhol’s 1961 work, “Coca Cola,” the seminal and
defining image of the American Pop Art movement. In his 1975 book, The
Philosophy of Andy Warhol, the artist describes Coca-Cola’s brand resonance, as
represented through that perfect piece of glass:

What’s great
about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers
buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see
Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke,
and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of
money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.
All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the
President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Amazingly, the
shape remains relevant even today, a full century on. Just as the silhouette
and size morphed subtly over time — sometimes squatter, sometimes leaner or
taller, growing from 6.5 ounces to 8-, 10-, and 12-ounce containers — the more
contemporary takes on the contour shape have made use of modern materials and
techniques. The 20-ounce contour bottle made of recyclable PET plastic was
introduced in 1993, while an inventive “contour can” was released in limited
editions in 1997. In 2008, the M5 aluminium contour bottle, a reimagining of
Coca-Cola packaging as innovative and refreshing as the original, was awarded
the first ever Design Grand Prix at the prestigious Cannes Lions.

And while the
contour bottle has been brought into the modern era, I still believe that many
of our design solutions of tomorrow will be inspired by the past. That’s why,
in 2014, Coca-Cola Design reached out to creative minds across the globe and
invited them to imagine the future of the contour experience. The brief for our
Icon + Mashup project was, in a nod to our past, simple but far from easy: to
embody Coca-Cola’s key messages of universal happiness and stubborn optimism,
while helping us imagine the next hundred years of the contour experience.

The results
were beyond our wildest expectations, an astonishing compendium of vision and
wit. It’s an old saying that in good design, form follows function, but with
these myriad approaches, everything from Turner Duckworth’s clever
interpretation of the bottle’s original creative brief to Paul Meates' layered
repurposing of vintage Coca-Cola ads, to Jovaney A. Hollingsworth’s nod to
modern Pop Art master Shepherd Fairey, we see that the contour bottle’s form
has transcended function. It remains by necessity a container, a vessel and a
dispensary, but one hundred years later it endures as a promise of quality and
authenticity, as always, but also the first step — anticipating touch and sound
and smell and, finally, taste — of the genuine Coca-Cola experience. It’s a
feeling as familiar as a memory, shared across the globe, unique and yet the
same for everyone, everywhere.

With that, I
invite you to enjoy this book’s incredible collection of archival photographs,
advertisements and designs, plus the exciting new works of Icon + Mashup art.
Better yet, grab some friends and family and some ice-cold bottles of Coke, and
help us — to borrow a phrase we’ve been using around the office of late — Kiss
the Past Hello.

James Sommerville is Vice President of
Global Design for The Coca-Cola Company. This essay is featured in ”Kiss the
Past Hello: 100 Years of the Coca-Cola Bottle”, available online through Assouline.